Smile Like You Mean It
by meyerlemon
Summary: Jack is tough. The last time she needed adults to look out for her, she was ten.
1. Chapter 1

When Jack is twelve, she's a hardscrabble little kid who's scrawny enough to pass for a boy. She fools everyone but the one with the goggles and the silver eyes, because he can smell her blood.

He leaves her with the Imam, and makes no promises.

He doesn't even say goodbye.

She waits for him for three months before taking off.

Jack is tough. The last time she needed adults to look out for her, she was ten. Since then, she's been on her own. She's not naïve, but she's young enough to still believe that she can make it just fine by herself.

She goes to the spaceport and hooks up with a crew of mercs out of Asterden City. Their chief is a gunrunner who goes by Macer, but Jack doubts that's his real name.

But it's not like Jack is hers, so she doesn't say anything.

The mercs are like mercs everywhere: iron-hard, not too clean, morally flexible when it comes to cash. Jack has all of ninety-two Helion credits to her name, and she offers them all to Macer if he'll take her on, teach her the trade.

Macer looks at her, a thin kid on the verge of adolescence, and grins.

"Ninety-two Helions," he says. "Ninety-two Helions doesn't even buy you a berth on the_Raker_."

He thumbs over his shoulder to the dinged-up craft the crew shares. Jack puts her hands on her hips and puffs out her chest.

"I'm a hard worker," she says.

Macer looks doubtful, but then he catches the eye of the_Raker's_ only female crewmember. Jack thinks that Shein is about Riddick's age. She's missing half of the ring finger on her left hand. Shein gives a little shrug, and Macer copies her example.

"All right," he says. "You bunk in the hold."

And that's it. For as long as it takes the_Raker_ to make the short hop to Plythia, Jack thinks that it's going to work out. She's going to learn the trade, and then she's going to find Riddick. Her plan stops there, but for twelve, even a tough, hardscrabble twelve, it's still a pretty good one.

She's hopeful right up to the point when Shein and Macer walk her into Plythia's dingiest spacer bar and swap her to a slaver for four thousand credits and a tank of fuel.

"Sorry, kid," Shein says, and Macer shrugs at her, like it's a shame, but no big deal.

Jack cries as they walk out.

For the next month, she cries almost incessantly.

When the month is over, she doesn't cry again for five years.

There's a block of time between thirteen and fifteen she doesn't remember all of. Flashes here and there, and timelines she's pieced together. She knows that at thirteen she started to fill out and the slaver lost the kiddie trade. He sold her to a gunrunner on Plythia four, who kept her as a house pet and loaned her to his friends. She killed a man for the first time with a dull eating knife she'd sharpened on a rock stolen from her owner's garden.

The man she killed was her owner's brother-in-law, and he was on top of her, and about to push into her. It was nothing that hadn't happened before, hundreds of times, but this was the last time, something in her decided; maybe her violated little-girl womb. Without thinking, Jack's hand came down, under the bed pad, and found the knife.

The man took a while to die. Jack sat up on the bed, still naked, the man's blood on her, and watched the light go out in his eyes.

Her owner went crazy over the dead body and the blood, and his little pet gone rabid. Jack offered to slit his throat for him if he didn't shut up. He fell quiet, but Jack killed him anyway.

Then she took a bath and changed into traveling clothes, and took off, her dead owner's credits heavy in her knap.

That's when the haze starts. Jack knows she shed her name and identity like dead skin, and became Kyra. She was pretty, and unable to pass for a boy any longer. She remembers men trying to touch her, and she remembers what she did to some of them, although not all.

She's a professional drifter, going from planet to planet, system to system. Here and there she takes a job as a hired knife for someone who doesn't ask questions and doesn't think that tits and a pretty face make you soft. She doesn't have a plan. She doesn't care where she ends up next year, as long as it's someplace she's never been before.

She's never rich, but she never starves.

She's fifteen or almost sixteen – she doesn't keep track of her birthdays anymore – when she shanks the wrong prick in a barfight on Servicon Five. The dead man was the governor's brother, and she knows, in a heartbeat, that she's done.

She goes from Slam to Slam until, at seventeen, she ends up on Crematoria. They don't know what else to do with her. She kills guards when they touch her. And, in a remarkable feat of hope triumphing over experience, they always touch her.

Kyra can barely remember his eyes, or the sound of his voice, but sometimes she remembers how warm he was, when the three of them were fleeing a dead world on a torn-up little ship with half its systems out. Deep space was so cold she hurt inside.

But Riddick was always warm. And that's what she thinks of when she's falling asleep in her cold stone alcove in a Slam she'll never leave. She grips a blade in each hand, rolls her back to the wall, and sinks into a half-sleep, remembering heat.

fin


	2. Chapter 2

Kyra comes awake slowly. She's suspended in a viscous liquid, and for a moment she panics. She's good at not allowing herself to panic, so she gets a grip in a few seconds and realizes that she's not drowning. There's something snaking down her throat, and she's breathing just fine, although it feels very wrong.

She puts her hands up and they bump into a hard, slick surface; neither her toes nor her head touch anything. Kyra thinks she must be in one of the newer susp-ani tubes, the kind of thing they use for burn victims and the like on the developed worlds.

She opens her eyes slowly, and there's a warm glow surrounding her. Kyra thinks that being in the womb must have been like this. Then she thinks that that's an unoriginal thought, and she feels a little embarrassed, but something foreign pushes through her veins, and she sleeps.

xxx

On Crematoria, they talk a little, the night before they race the sun to the ship. She's mending what's left of her other pair of pants, sitting cross-legged on a stone platform. The air in her cell changes almost imperceptibly, and Kyra would be hard-pressed to say how: perhaps the temperature goes up by a quarter of a degree.

Either way, she knows it's him before she looks up.

"Yeah?" She says- a challenge. Men don't come into her cell. Or, they come in, but they don't leave.

Riddick pulls a knife out of his boot, and Kyra recognizes the blade: it belongs to that Waurian with the scar running down his face. It was the best knife in the entire Slam, and it makes sense that Riddick has it.

"Kyra," he says. "This blade is dull as fuck. You got a stone I can borrow?"

Kyra pulls one of her whetstones out from under her bed and throws it at him, without looking, harder than is necessary. She hears the fleshythud as it lands in his palm.

"You've got an arm on you," Riddick says, and she knows that that's probably as close as he'll ever get to human warmth, but she's stupid, so she talks.

"I said they slaved me out."

He's examining the whetstone, looking for an angle to start working the blade. She watches his face as she speaks.

"I was twelve years old and the slaver sold me as a virgin nine times," she says. Behind the silver, something flickers in his eyes.

It's not pity. Riddick has none. She doesn't know what to call it, but she has to look away.

"They liked it when I cried," she says. "They believed it as long as I cried. I guess by the tenth one, I didn't care anymore."

She gives a little shrug. "That's when it got bad. I made him less money when I didn't care."

Riddick draws the knife across the whetstone, slow and loud.

"The kind of man who likes little kids doesn't want them silent."

There's no inflection to his tone. It's just an observation, like he doesn't care one way or another.

Inside Kyra, a feeling she hasn't had for a long time bubbles up. It's weakness. She wants to ask what he would have done if he were there. She wants to tell him that she taught herself to kill by imagining and then emulating what Riddick would do to the men who wanted her child's flesh.

"I'm going to bed," she says.

Riddick says nothing. The sound of steel on whetstone follows her to her bunk. For the first time in years, she sleeps a true sleep.

xxx

Kyra wakes again, and makes a noise around the tube down her throat. Nothing happens, so she pushes her palm against the wall surrounding her. She's tired of sleeping, and she's tired of dreaming. She's weak like a newborn, but she slaps against the tube as hard as she can, over and over.

The substance that makes her sleepy and docile flows through her veins again, and when she next wakes up, she's naked on a medical pallet, tube out of her throat, but an oxy mask over her nose and mouth.

Three medicals hover over her, probing and measuring. One of them pulls down his face shield, and when she sees that he's a male, she grabs weakly at him, and then tries to cover herself. She has no shame, but men don't see her naked. She kills for that.

She's too weak to move, and to her horror, she feels herself start to cry with frustration.

"Sedate her?"

"Better not," another one says. "He wants to see her right away."

Kyra is wrapped in a thick robe that covers her from neck to toe, and carried to a floating pallet that moves her across a short stretch of hallway into another room. She's too weak to ask questions, or to move herself. She sort of regrets demanding to be let out of the susp-ani tube.

She drops off for a moment to the sound of the medicals whispering in the background, and wakes again when sharp orders and thudding boots signal a new arrival.

"Kyra?"

It's him. He looks no different. He doesn't even look like he's taken a shower, Kyra thinks. The part of her brain in charge of analytical thought wonders how long she's been out. The rest of her brain wants to cry. And she does, when one of his big hands comes to rest on her forehead, and smoothes her hair back, over and over. She can only move her head, so she twists away from him and tries to bury her face in the pillow.

"Get out," he says.

"My lord—"

"Get i out /i ," Riddick says, and the others in the room fade away. She sleeps.

xxx

It's another week before she can sit up by herself.

She hates her new, slow, clumsy body. Hates the extra fat she's put on. Hates more than anything that she can't bathe or clothe herself. She tries to start thinking about how she's going to get out of here, but it seems so impossible.

"I hate it," she tells the medicals. "Make it better! Fix me!"

"You were dead," the one with the round face says. "We brought you back from the Underverse."

"I don't care," she says. "Fix me."

They confer for a while, so long that she falls asleep. Kyra figures that she sleeps almost two thirds of the time, and she hates it, because every time she wakes up, it's in terror. Anything could happen while you sleep. Anything at all. She tries to stay awake. Tries so hard, but her body betrays her, over and over.

"Kyra?"

It's him again, the first time she's seen him since she woke up. She can speak now, and move at least a little. She pulls her robe tighter around her.

"They say I was dead," she blurts out.

"You were," he says. "I watched you die."

Kyra feels the familiar tiredness creep over her again. _I hate it,_ she thinks.

"They say you won't sleep," Riddick says. "You gotta sleep, Kyra."

She plucks at the heavy nap of her robe for a while, then looks up. Her head is so heavy it's an effort.

"I can't," she says, and her shame at the catch in her voice almost overcomes her desire to sleep. "It's not—it's not safe."

"Kyra," Riddick says. "Sleep. I'll watch."

She's too tired to argue, and too proud to thank him.

Blackness comes.

xxx

Riddick's personal chambers are longer than they are wide, and he puts Kyra in the room farthest from the corridor. You have to walk through Riddick's bed chamber, and then a second corridor to get to hers, and there are no other doors. She thinks it's probably supposed to be a dressing room; it's small, but it's not like she's been doing a lot of expansive exercising recently.

"You'll be able to sleep here," he says. It's not a question, so Kyra feels obligated to argue.

"What, just because you're outside?"

"You think anyone's going to come through me?"

"You think you're so tough," Kyra says.

"I think I rule the Necromongers," Riddick says, and he sounds almost amused.

"Yeah?" Kyra says, although she's almost asleep. "How'd that happen?"

"What you kill, you keep," he replies, and before she drifts off, she feels him tuck a blade into her left hand. Between the knife, and his presence, she sleeps for three days. When she wakes, she can walk. Walking isn't running, but it's a start.

fin.


End file.
